as a thrilling response
to art, falls back upon Hutcheson in minimizing the importance of
art and making it secondary to moral knowledge. Armstrong, while
describing taste as the sensitive discrimination of degrees of beauty
and deformity, bases this discrimination not on artistic, but on moral
qualities.

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, II, 134.]

The complete transition from classic to romantic premises of taste is
characterized by the separation of art from morals. This step neither
Cooper nor Armstrong takes. But they do exhibit tendencies which
explain how the shift was made possible. Both writers insist on a felt
response to a work of art. Cooper emphasizes that this response must
be to the whole work. This assumption implies that a work of art is
an entity complete in itself; it makes possible the argument that
art conveys artistic, not moral knowledge. Cooper, by stressing
sensibility as an effect of taste, suggests the Wordsworthian notion
that the poet is more sensitive than other people.

Armstrong, in addition to his hostility to formal criticism and his
confidence in the natural man, reveals three other tendencies which
later eighteenth-century critics elaborated. Like Edward Young in his
_Conjectures on Original Composition_, 1759, Armstrong opposes slavish
imitation of ancient models and declares that the writer should "catch
their graces without affecting it [them]" so that his "own original
characteristical manner will still distinguish itself."[3] Armstrong
emphasizes exquisiteness of perception as the basis for taste: the
more exquisite the mind, the more is it able to discriminate among
the various degrees of the beautiful and the deformed. Although later
critics repudiate Armstrong's moral discrimination, they transform
it into a refined discrimination of aesthetic qualities. Finally, by
suggesting that the man of genius differs from the man of taste by
his ability to handle a medium, Armstrong implies the possibility of
a technical criticism in terms of the writer's craft, apart from moral
judgment.

[Footnote 3: _Ibid._, II, 168.]

Although the works of Cooper and Armstrong elicited contrasting
popular reactions--_Letters concerning Taste_ running into four
editions from 1755 to 1771 and Armstrong's writings, with the
exception of _The Art of Preserving Health_, never winning much public
favor--neither writer exerted a strong critical influence. Cooper did
not reassess or change significantly the ass